Conventional medicine, as the medicine taught at universities is often called, has two claims: It wants to explain the chances of success of its treatment concepts according to the best scientific knowledge and be able to prove them empirically.

Because it can only approximately meet this ideal, the label of science-oriented medicine (WOM) is appropriate for it.

Since its beginnings around 200 years ago, however, WOM has always been subject to hostilities.

We are also currently seeing this: Corona denial, vaccination opposition and scientific skepticism often go hand in hand with radical WOM criticism.

The Münsteraner Kreis as an interdisciplinary group with the participation of physicians, ethicists and lawyers, which wants to convey the functioning of modern academic medicine,

In his most recent memorandum, we describe that medicine is about helping the sick and preventing disease through prevention.

In order to be as patient-friendly as possible in this sense, she has to use the best of her knowledge at the sickbed in a humane manner.

This makes it much more successful today than it used to be, even if there are still many diseases that are difficult to treat.

In addition to the individual patient, medicine must also consider the well-being of the entire population or specific groups within it.

At the same time, public health measures in politically egalitarian societies do not conflict with an individual perspective: in most cases, public health measures also benefit the individual members of the collective.

It is undisputed that the development of population-related interventions, such as the current vaccination campaign, always requires ethical and legal considerations.

Modern medicine owes its potential mainly to scientific insights, new technologies and the use of mathematical methods for effectiveness tests and modelling.

In addition to scientific knowledge, WOM also uses social science,

The pandemic has demonstrated how medicine works

Coping with the pandemic is exemplary for all of this: Thanks to modern molecular biological virology, the nature of the virus could be understood in a very short time.

Initial uncertainties about the benefits of masks, distance requirements and contact reductions were unavoidable due to the lack of reliable research results.

New mRNA vaccines were then developed with unprecedented speed based on many years of research.

In addition, traditional vaccines and medication to alleviate the disease are now available.

More and more useful data was also collected and introduced, for example on psychological issues relating to pandemic knowledge, hygiene measures and the willingness to be vaccinated.

As everywhere, all claims to knowledge in medicine are fallible: they are not final and may have to be revised in the light of new findings.

This does not mean, however, that one claim to knowledge is as good as the other.

Obviously, we notoriously trust fallible knowledge in all important areas, such as the construction and use of airplanes or bridges.

In doing so, we rely on scientifically sound validity standards, which we have been successful on the whole.

Not compatible with proven explanatory networks

Where possible, WOM uses insights from two different cognitive strategies: on the one hand, theory and experiment-based arguments for how diseases occur and can be treated, on the other hand, empirical-clinical data.

With the first method, systematic explanatory networks are created that are decisive for the validity standards mentioned above.

In contrast, beliefs about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), which cannot be reconciled at all with proven explanatory networks, are to be regarded as implausible to absurd, depending on the context.

Examples of the latter are concepts such as high potentiation and water memory in homeopathy.